Decentering Europe, Recentering Islam

Focusing on public controversies around Islam in Europe and the emergence of Turkey as a model within the framework of the Arab Spring, this essay attempts to articulate an alternative conceptual and critical frame in order to recenter the conceptions of Europe from the perspective of Islamic difference. It seeks to understand the displacement of Islam from the margins to the center, from the postcolonial past to the European present, as it follows various historical trajectories and creates new interpenetrations and mixings between different cultural codes, values, and practices. Drawing on the interconnected histories of Muslims and Europe at different moments that raise issues of memory, identity, and religion, this essay invites a new critical turn—one that cannot be fully grasped in the mirror of the postcolonial, insofar as Islam and Europe exist face-to-face in the present time, relating and confronting their experiences in the same chronotope.